NW Day Six: The Crown of the Continent

We’ve had a series of late nights and early days, so decided to set our alarm for 8 this morning instead of our usual seven. By 8:50, the Jedi was taking stuff outside to load the van…where he was greeted by the sight of two cows, casually crossing the street. No pictures of this, unfortunately, but here was our view from the lodge window and parking lot.

We still had a lot of baked goods in the van from our very first stop at Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana. After spending some time, and money, in the lodge gift shop...

we parked the van with a view of the mountains and ate apple turnovers, blueberry loaf, and cold cheese pizza for breakfast. At least, that’s what the rest of the family had. I got a coconut almond chocolate chip muffin and an almond milk hot chocolate from the lodge café. 

We drove into the park, 

read aloud the bear safety pamphlet we were given

and stopped at the St. Mary Visitor Center

 which had a small learning center with cool displays. 

I don’t even know what time it was when we finally started on Going to the Sun Road. But we spent a LOT of time on just a few miles of road, because the scenery looked like this…..

We also stopped and headed for a few short hikes off the road at a couple little creek junctions. Because again, this..

 

 And then more overlooks like this...

We didn’t reach Logan Pass, altitude 6646 feet,  until 2:20. 

We hit the restrooms there, and then, had our packed lunches the lodge had bagged up for us. Again, we ate in the car because the wind was so intense it would have made picnicking outside a real hassle. (At the St. Mary’s Visitor Center, the Jedi had asked the rangers if it was always this windy. The rangers told him that they usually measured how windy a season was, by how many flags they had to replace. This year, they said, they’ve only had to replace one American flag and one Blackfoot Nation flag. There are some years where they have to replace all the flags up to three times.)

Our lunches were awesome homemade treats. Sandwiches on whole wheat bread, loaded with the lunch meats we had ordered the night before, with lettuce and tomato. (I got everyone’s tomato slices. We had specified no tomato for Boybot, but I didn’t bother trying to special order anyone else’s sandwich.) There were apples and a bag of carrots in each lunch, a bag of chips (which we had already eaten as a snack to hold us over when we weren’t going to make the pass by lunchtime), a water bottle, and homemade cookies wrapped in cellophane. I don’t know what they put in the cookies, but they were wholesome and filling, none of this empty sugar stuff. These cookies were clearly baked for HIKERS.

After lunch, we put on our own hiking boots, and headed up the Hidden Lake Trail at Logan Pass. 

The trail was 1.5 miles to the overlook. But I REALLY wanted to do some hiking in the mountains, and the rest of the family sucked it up and humored me. The first quarter of the trail was a set of boardwalk steps that went up the slope of an alpine valley. Though it started off looking all innocent and easy....

The stairs were the most difficult portion of the hike. But even from just this part, the views were wonderful.

When we reached the top of the stairs, the trail flattened out, somewhat, and turned into a gravel trail that hugged the edge of the mountain peak, complete with streams and waterfalls.

I have to confess, after we had passed much of this, 

that I put forth the idea of turning back. I knew it was much later in the day than we had planned, the hike had been long and strenuous, we had taken some great photos and had the experience of hiking in the mountains that I had wanted. But the Jedi said, no, we had come this far, we might as well go all the way to the overlook.

I am so glad he did. This was by far the most spectacular view I think I have ever seen. 

While the Grand Canyon was mind-boggling in its size and scope, I think the mountains have it beat for breath-taking beauty. 

Eventually, after a few more family photos, we had to tear ourselves away and head back. 

For the record, we hiked three miles round trip. We hiked up to 7140 feet in elevation, so a total gain of 494 feet. There were spots on the trail where the four of us were the only humans in sight. The scent of the pine, the near total stillness and silence....I can't

 even describe how awe inspiring this hike was.

 But we did have to share the mountains with others…

And finally we reached the stairs back down.

We drove over the continental divide, and then headed down the west side of the Rocky Mountains. 

 We also hiked the Trail of the Cedars, but after Hidden Lake, even a pretty little water fall in an ancient forest couldn’t compete.

We ended our day in Glacier wading in Lake MacDonald. (Well, two of us waded. I wasn’t about to put my feet in those icy waters!)

We left the park a little after 8, and then realized we had close to an hour drive to Kalispell, and that Bullman’s Food Fired Pizza closed at 9. I phoned an order in for pick up (one medium rocky mountain pizza and one medium pioneer pizza). We got there at about ten till nine. Our intention was to take the pizza back to our room….but there was a ColdStone right next door, so we ate in the van for the third time that day, and then headed into ColdStone for dessert.

NW Day Five: Montana, the Endless State

You will all be pleased to note that I looked up some of the things I couldn’t remember. 

We ate dinner a couple of days ago at Kroll’s Diner in Bismark, North Dakota. Boybot and I ordered one of their specialties, Fleischkuechle, which is  seasoned hamburger wrapped in pastry and deep fried. Boybot and Sweetling split a big bowl of Knoephla soup, which was a creamy yellow cream of chicken soup with potatoes and dumplings.

There. I feel better about myself. 

We also got of the hotel ON TIME this morning. 

View from the hotel and the gas station next to the hotel. 

And this ominous sign at the edge of the gas station parking lot. 

We’re spending most of the day driving north on Route 287.  I’ve snapped a few pictures from the window of the moving van.

But this, this warranted pulling over and taking some real photos. The Jedi even turned the van AROUND so we could come back and take pictures of this. 

Our speculation is that they animate at night and roam the ranges as an undead horse herd. The sunlight renders them immobile. What you cant see in the photo is that they would sway ever so slightly, bend and twist up there on the hillside. 

Our original itinerary included getting into  Helena for lunch around 11:30/12:00. But I’m finding google map drive time estimates to be significantly less than what it actually takes us to drive between point a and point b. Some of that is that ther’s been a lot of construction where traffic is down to one lance and the speed limit is 45 mph for long stretches, instead of the 75 that google maps based its estimate on.

Another factor is that we’ve made unscheduled stops, like a Walmart stop today for one thing (microfiber eyeglasses clothes to make an emergency repair to Eswin’s headphones because the foam fabric around the ear pieces was disintegrating.) this stop turned into FOUR separate trips into Walmart. One for “guys” (plastic ninja figures in plastic bubbles from vending machines) and the eyeglass clothes, one to use the restrooms, one because we realized they might have a redbox, and the last one to get rubber bands to hold the cloth in place. In the parking lot, there was another family in a van with Ohio license plates, and they brought their dog with them! No one tell Jupiter.

(Also in the parking lot of the Walmart was a single seagull. The Jedi looked at him and said, "You're lost, buddy.")

We wound up not hitting lunch till 1:20, nearly two hours behind schedule, despite our on time start to the day. 

Lunch was at Steve’s Café, which was delicious. 

The servings were HUMOUNGOUS. Here’s Sweetling with her order of strawberry pancakes off the special menu “for smaller appetites”.

Boybot and I tried their huckleberry items. Boybot got a single huckleberry pancake that was the size of a medium pizza. I got their huckleberry stuffed French toast.

We left the café at 2:30ish and realized that there was no way we were making it to the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning before it closed at 4:30.

But that was ok, because it gave us extra time to stop and check out this awesome rock shop we found in the middle of nowhere. 

Much time was spent there, and everyone came away with a few really cool treasures. Boybot is especially proud that he walked away with a collection corresponding to the characters in Steven Universe...garnet, amethyst, rose quartz, peridot, jasper, and even a piece of lapus that the shopkeep threw in for free. She didn't have any small pieces on her shelves for sale, so she went into the back to look for more. She could only find a small chip that had broken off of something else, so she gave that to Boybot at no charge. (Interesting fact, the shop was founded by the woman who made a dinosaur next discovery at Egg Mountain. Finding these nests changed how scientists understood dinosaur behaviors to be.)

Our original itinerary also had included a hike to the waterfalls on St. Mary’s Lake in Glacier, but we knew in advanced that this area was closed due to forest fire damage.  So, that also gave us more time to pull over and take pictures of roadside attractions, like this…

And this (remember what I said about the rock shop founder?)

And it gave us more time for stops in latrine style rest stations like this…

Where the Jedi cautioned, “Now before you go in there, you want to look around and make sure….”

And I interrupted, “Critter check before you drop your pants.”

And Sweetling said, “I can’t believe that just had to be said.”

It also included a stretch of construction where we encountered this sign....

And then had to wait to be escorted through the stretch of PAVED highway by this truck...

The last stretch of this long trip was through the lands of the Blackfoot Nation.

I don’t know what time it was when we pulled into Browning. Half past six, maybe? We headed over to Nation’s Burgers. (Passing TWO expresso huts on opposing street corners. One in a little log cabin styled hut and one in a tepee styled structure.)

Nation’s Burgers was delicious. 

No sit down seating, drive through and walk up carry out only. They did have a nice grass covered area with picnic tables, but it was really windy, so we got our burgers and ate them in the van. I was adventurous and tried the Southwestern Berry Burger. It was really good, put pretty spicy and very messy.

We headed back in for soft serve ice cream and a hot chocolate for me. Then we found a parking lot to sit and watch the sunset over the rockies. Sadly, the clouds killed the sunset, but there was still a really pretty sky.

The highway out of town was, again, under construction. Under construction to the extent that there was no blacktop and no concrete, they had stripped the road down to just the gravel and packed earth. Mind you there was no warning about this. One moment we were driving on blacktop, the next moment we had been dropped (literally), on bare ground. The lack of road extended as far as we could see in the fading light. We turned the van around and found an alternate route up to St. Mary. School Star Road turned out to be smoothly paved the whole way and had the added bonus of taking us past a little neighborhood where there was a horse, all by itself, walking down the road like he was a stray dog.

Our room in the St. Mary lodge was rustic. So rustic there was no wifi and no cell phone bars either.

NW Day Four: Big Sky

NW Day Four: Big Sky

This morning, we managed to get out of the hotel only 50 minutes behind schedule. I don’t understand what’s happening in the morning. We didn’t have this problem on any of our other road trips. But it is a definite issue now.

On the bright side, we did have caramel rolls from Krolls Café for breakfast. (Ok, I still haven’t figured out the name of that German American diner. ) Also, the Jedi’s patience with us is remarkable.

Our first stop was just thirty minutes down the highway at the Painted Canyon in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. There was a trail down into the canyon, which I had presented to the family as an option when we were trip planning. 

--A word about how our trip planning process went this time. We wrote to all the states, technically, we filled out a ‘pleae send me stuff’ form on the states’ travel websites. When we got tourism brochures, we spread them out on the coffee table and looked through them to make a wish list for each state. We also solicited for suggestions on Facebook and through friends. We checked out suggestions on RoadsideAmerica.com. And from all that, we made a wish list.

At this point, the Jedi sat down and plotted out a route based on the key places we wanted to visit (Glacier, Seattle, Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore.) Then he tried to break the drive time into manageable chunks each day, while still leaving us with time to make stops for food and activities each day.  He selected cities and towns to be our destinations for each night based on the route and the drive time.

Then the Jedi and I went back over the wish list to rule out locations that were too far off of our route. And then, the work of actually forming a possible itinerary started. Beginning with our first day, we went over the route, looked at the stops we wanted to make, searched trip advisor and road food for places to eat. Used google maps to come up with how long it would take to drive between each location, and came up with a potential working itinerary. (On the itinerary document, we include the name of each location, its GPS co-ordinates if needed, information about hours and ticket prices, and a link to its website.)

When we had about a weeks worth of stuff planned out, I printed a copy of the itinerary for each child, had them get a pencil and a clip board, and then the itinerary got graded. We sat in the living room and used the media center to pull up a map for that day as well as a link to information/website/pictures about each potential stop for food, recreation, or whatever. The kids then wrote on their clipboard and gave each idea a grade A—F. I told them that I would take their grades into consideration, but that some things we were doing because the Jedi or myself really wanted to do them.

--Back to us in the Painted Canyon. There was a hiking trail, but the hiking trail had received D’s from both kids, so we declined taking it. Instead we just took pictures at the overlook. 

I forced Boybot to take a selfie with me and Sweetling.

We spent a little longer than I had planned enjoying the view and the beautiful day.

Painted Canyon was right off the highway. I mean right off. It was marked as a rest stop. As we had pulled into the visitor’s parking lot, we drove over a cattle grate. We paused on the cattle grate as we drove out, because the kids didn’t know what it was. The Jedi was explaining that the cattle don’t like to walk over them, because they sense that their hooves would get stuck in the grating. 

“Although,” said the Jedi, “this grate is probably to keep the bison in the park, rather than keep the cows out.  Not that the flimsy little fence they have would stop a bison.”

We all agreed, the five foot tall not even chain link fence, would not stop a bison. 

We’ve seen a bison charge before; that stuff is no joke.

And yet, as we pulled out of the park the Jedi said, “Oh look, there they are now. Down by the fence.”

 

And indeed they were. Down by the fence, happily grazing. That’s twice we’ve seen bison on this trip. Both times they were acting like peaceful, calm animals. (I don't have a photo, just a movie taken from the passenger window as we passed. Those never load on the blog well. Sorry!)

The Painted Canyon was right off the highway, and I *thought* our next stop was also right off the highway. It certainly was right *next to* the highway on google maps.

It turns out right next to is not the same as right off the highway, so we had a bit of a drive to get to it. But this turned out to be a wonderful thing because our drive took us past….

….PRAIRIE DOGS!!!!

Their burrows filled a field along both sides of a park road. We sat in the van and watched them and listened to them squeak. One of us, I won’t say who, tried to hatch an elaborate, yet fool proof plot to lure one or two of them into the van to take home. Sadly, this plan got vetoed by the rest of the family.

Sweetling said, “That’s ok, Mommy, maybe we can find you a stuffed animal prairie dog to take home.”

The Jedi said, “At least that option wouldn’t have the plague.”

So, I was unjustly forced to leave my prairie dogs behind, and we continued on down the road, out of North Dakota and into Montana. 

Oh, though the prairie dogs were clearly my favorite, the view from Vista Trail was also cool.

 As was the not-really-too-long drive up and back.

We stopped in Glendive and ate lunch at Li’s Chinese Restaurant. It was a small family run place and shared half a building with the Wagon Wheel Saloon. Li’s was clearly the place to eat lunch on a Sunday, because the little dining room was packed. We got the last empty table. The buffet was, like the restaurant itself, small but good. We all filled and cleared at least two plates. The Jedi and the kids ordered smoothies from the surprisingly long list of options. They ordered strawberry-banana, strawberry-kiwi, and mango-banana. We got them to go, and headed out to find a park with river access.

For a small town, Glendive had a LOT  of city parks which included everything from a splash park to a skateboard park. But in the end, we found a boat access ramp with some parking. We parked, walked down the ramp, and headed out along the rocky shores of the Yellowstone River to hunt for agates. Within a minute or less, Boybot was holding a huge stone with some (we think) agate deposits. Our rock hunted adventure was SO plentiful, that we spread all of our finds out to pick just the best specimens to keep. It was a huge success and rated on the kids lists of favorites for the trip.

Fun fact: Did you know the distance across Montana, from east to west, is about the same as the distance between New York and Chicago? This made for a long drive day.

With rest stops with signs like this...

Between the late start and the extra time at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, we wound up rolling into Pompey’s Pillar just 15 minutes before the gate closed. The ranger at the gate gave us 30 minutes to drive up, hike the steps up the rock, take our pictures, and  get the van back out. OR, he said, we could park the van outside of the gate and walk the half mile or sso to the rock and take all the time we wanted. We did the drive and the power walk up the stairs to take pictures of Clark’s engraving on the rock.

With 3 minutes to spare, Boybot and I ran (Yo Adrien!) up to the very top of Pompey’s Pillar to take photos from the top. Totally worth it.

We jogged back to the van, and was out of the gate in the allotted time. From outside, I took some distance photos of the Pillar.

And of the field of sunflowers between us and the pillar.

This, of course, had us hitting Billings Montana around 8:30 for dinner. We had originally planned on eating at The Rex, but it turned out to be a bit more high-brow than we wanted. We were all in the mood for cowboy steak, not fine-dining steak. So instead, we did a quick trip adviser search and headed to Montana Rib and Chop House. 

We walked in, and there were patrons sitting at tables with cowboy hats on. One of the staff complemented Sweetling on her Strongbad shirt. There were posters on the walls for Monday night football specials. We knew we had found our people. The steak was *amazing*. I was too hungry to remember to take a picture of mine, which is a shame because it was incredible. 

The Jedi, on the other hand, remembered to take a photo of his steak and the loaded potato Sweetling and I had to split because it was bigger than either our our HEADS.

Oh, and our server wrote her name upside down and backwards on our table in a single second in cursive with two crayons. (It was right side up for us who were sitting at the table.) We were pretty impressed by that trick.

We were too stuffed for dessert, which is saying a lot for us. We wound up rolling in to the hotel around 11:30. Fortunately, we have a late start morning the next day and don’t need to wake up till 8.